Oh Keebler,

I am very disappointed in your new green “marketing campaign” with Terracycle. It is a complete green washed mess. My roommate Crystal (yes, her name is also Crystal) came home tonight with a bag of Sandies Shortbread Dark Chocolate Almond cookies. The bag was already open, but there was no way to reseal it — and she didn’t want the cookies to go stale. So, she put the cookies in a tupperware, recycled the plastic tray that held them– but what could be done with the outside foil-lined plastic package? I pessemistically told her that it was unfortunately just trash.

“Wait! It says something here that it is green…” — Crystal gestured me over to read the package. I thought to myself, “Wow maybe Keebler stepped its green game up…”

The package reads ” News from the Hollow Tree! Keebler and TerraCycle have joined forces to collect and turn cookie wrappers into great eco-friendly products your family will love. Get involved and discover how this wrapper can be repurposed through upcycling — go to keebler.com to: (1) Help keep wrappers out of landfills  (2) Learn about a join a Cookie Wrapper Brigade  (3) Collect wrappers for a good cause.

Schemes like this really piss me off! Keebler is just putting up this green marketing scheme as a front so they can continue making the horribly unsustainable package that they always have. Instead of taking preventable actions — like redesigning their package to be biodegradable, recyclable, or useful past its life as a cookie package — they are just reassuring costumers that they will do something to reuse the packaging. They will just worry about it later.

You should check out the Keebler website. They encourage customers to mail in their bags and then Keebler will figure out something to do with it. Really? You expect customers to leave their home, go to the post office, and mail their bag to you? When their trash can is like 2 feet away? Yeah, sounds like you be receiving loads of bags.

Watch the Terracycle video also. I know it sounds all good and green, but I personally do not agree! These people are just elongating the lifecycle of trash — which is a temporary fix. You have to start rethinking what packaging is before you manufacture it.

Don’t expect people to change their behavior (and send in their trash) when companies like YOU refuse to change YOUR behavior.

Whew. Sorry that was a long, angry rant.

It has been almost a year since the Closed Loop started– one year of composting all of my food waste. I have got to say, the transition was not that difficult. I should start weighing the amount of compost I collect every week, it would be interesting to see how many pounds of food waste is composted in one year.

The photo above is what the compost bin looks like in my apartment in Atlanta. Somehow it always morphs into a smiley face… basically, we collect the food in a bin that is [unfortunately] lined with plastic bags. It is the easiest way to transport the compost to my roommmate’s house in rural Georgia. We are hopefully going to switch to biodegradable plastic bags soon. The Georgia Tech campus dining halls compost all their food waste — but they are hesitant to let students compost their food waste there as well.

I inserted some of the photos from the article below:

Kiddies recycling.

What mixed recycling looks like before it is sorted into different types (plastic, aluminum, glass, etc)

Nantucket claims that composting is HUGE factor in how they are decreasing the volume of their landfills. Look at this huge room just for compost!

WALL-E anyone?

Thanks everyone for coming to the first Closed Loop lecture yesterday! Very special thanks to S.O.S. for giving me the opportunity. I hope everyone who attended enjoyed the presentation, I definitely loved speaking to all of you guys. Someone took a video, so I will post that soon for those of you who missed it.

My next presentation is on October 22nd for a brown bag lunch event at Georgia Tech Research Institute.

I don’t know if recycling-awareness techniques have changed in the past 5 months since I have been away, but with some changes recycling at tech could be more successful. As part of this project, I have have been thinking of ways to bring what I have learned back to Tech. I think its really important to have organic compost to reduce food waste in landfills. It is definitely a lifestyle change though. I am going to have a chat with Cindy…

Hey Tech kids– would you be willing to participate in a composting program? if it was logistically worked out, basically you would collect food waste in a seperate bin and need to deposit it somewhere periodically where it would be taken to a given composting site. Would it be hard? Easy? What do you think? Please post your answer/comments/concerns… maybe it will happen!

“These innovative bags are designed to fully decompose in about 14 weeks when placed in a hot, active compost bin or pile…So you eat the chips. The earth eats the bag. And we all live in a cleaner world”.

You may be thinking…

1) What are the bags made out of? Answer: Journey for a Better Bag

2) How do they work? How are they sustainable? Answer: SunChips Behind the Scenes

2) What in the world is hot, active compost? Answer: Compost in Your Backyard

SunChips actually answers all these questions! I can’t express how frustrating it is when companies claim their products are “green” and then never explain why or how or what material. They think saying “AND product X is green so it is good for the environment” is enough information to placate people. (Maybe it is? okay that issue is a different post altogether).

Designers listen up! When you design a product and have planned out its afterlife and how it should be used and disposed of.. inform the consumers! Everyday recyclables are thrown in the trash because people are (a) lazy or (b) do not know that they are supposed to be recycling it. Communicate in someway what someone should do with an expired product. After all, you are enabling them with your design.. how are they supposed to know what you want them to do? A lot of the packaging I have left over from frozen goods and other foods without recycling labels… I have no idea what to do with. I’m not suggesting every product comes with an extra long manual because who actually reads those? Maybe new recyclable-phrases can be incorporated into packaging. Phrases like “After use, place in compost”. Or provide the user with alternatives, “For more information about re-using this bottle, visit website X”. Consumers can’t read minds; it is our job to teach them.

The way SunChips presented their new developments is so upfront and clear. I love it! They really explain themselves in a thorough way. It is like they actually want the consumer to understand and enjoy their product (what a concept). Props to Frito Lay. Check out their website for other interesting sustainable projects too.

What do other designers think?

1) Have you thought about how you want a user to dispose of your projects/products?

2) How did you want to educate them (manual, label, intuition…)

3) Is this even important to designers? Is it a designer’s job?

Here is the video of the focus group for public viewing. Great thanks to the participants Benjamin Jakimow, Daniel Mancera, Nayeli Gutierrez, Mirre Van Tilburg, and Erik W. Bjoennes! I know it was kind of ghetto in my apartment, but I think it went really well. Thank you for volunteering and also allowing me to post the video on the website- it was very interesting and I am sure the readers appreciate it.

Erik said something interesting after the focus group was over. He said convenience is really key when encouraging people to be more environmentally friendly. He has to travel 15 minutes to recycle glass in his hometown. So if he only has one or two bottles and he does not feel like traveling 15 minutes, he will just throw them in the trash. He admits that he is not as environmental as he could be. Sometimes it really just comes down to getting over laziness. Thanks for the insight Erik.

There will be a formal analysis of the focus group to follow this week.

Mr. McQuire: Ben, I just want to say one word to you, just one word…

Ben: Yes, sir.

Mr. McQuire: Are you listening?

Ben: Yes, I am.

Mr. McQuire: Plastics.

Ben: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McQuire: There is a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Okay, plastics are here! Now what?

(1) What does design have to do with collecting trash?

(2) What is so wrong with throwing something in the trash?

(3) How is keeping trash in your room helping anything… ?

Okay honestly, an invisible jaw of mine drops every time I hear these questions. It really pisses me off that people still think designers just “make things look pretty”. On that note, this research project is more about education rather than scorning, I just had to let a little of that designer fury out.

(1) Industrial designers make products. There is a whole life cycle of a product to consider in addition to aesthetics/appearance.  So when the appearance of a new product is all set, it is manufactured, packaged, shipped, and then sold. Then someone buys that product, uses it, and then (depending on what product) throws it away when he/she is done with it. A product that is thrown away is STILL a product. Someone designed it! It is an industrial designers job to consider the “garbage” process of his/her product too.

Sometimes I wonder, “If I had not gone to design school, would I even care about the life cycle of products?” Probably not. I would probably buy them and toss them out too without even thinking about it. But how many landfills can the earth hold? I don’t want to find out. In this generation, we all start off with a “consumer” mentality. Seriously, from our first diaper (which was designed, mass manufactured, and disposed of). It is kind of creepy to think about, but there is a certain standard of how to interact with products that we start practicing at a very young age>> (1) Buy. (2) Use. (3) Garbage. Let’s change this standard.

(2) Excess trash and overflowing landfills = pollution. Very bad. Very Very bad. A lot of products that have been disposed of (made of non-biodegradable materials like plastic) last forever. So if we keep filling up landfills with trash that we throw away, we are going to run out of space. Re-visit my research presentation for more on this: “Closed Loop” Experiment Presentation

I think eventually people will learn to see products as a USER rather than consumer. There is a big difference between the word “user” and “consumer”. The word “user” means that someone bought a product and is using it for a function/purpose. After they use it for that function, what happens? So perhaps the definition implies that a “user” has room to think and decide what happens after a product’s purpose is fulfilled. The word “consumer” is a bit misleading. If you “consume” something, it is gone; you have used it all up. But, this isnt true of most products, when you “consume” them they do not disappear. Yet, we use the word “consumerism” to describe the current economic movement (and mentality).

(3) Keeping the trash in my room is simulating the pollution that is occurring. As a designer, it is really making me think about the future products I may design. What are the things I want to throw away? How can they be designed differently so they are more sustainable and less disposable? Or how I can I make disposable items more biodegradable? How do I feel in this environment? What if every user did not produce any trash? Are there other purposes for items I throw away? It is a process and an experience that I am going through for inspiration.

Hopefully this post was a little educational about why I am doing this research project. Whew sorry that was a long one.